Eduardo González
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, and the Peruvian vice-chancellor, Ignacio Higueras, met last Monday in Lima to formally agree on the continuation of preparations for the next International Congress of the Spanish Language (CILE, by its acronym in Spanish), to be held in the city of Arequipa in 2025.
Also present at the meeting were Guido Toro, director of Cultural Affairs of the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the ambassador of Spain, Alejandro Alvargonzález.
Arequipa, which was to have hosted the last CILE – which was finally hosted by Cadiz in March 2023 – will thus take up the baton and organize the tenth edition of this great gathering of Spanish-speaking countries around the Spanish language.
Arequipa’s candidacy for the IX CILE, officially presented by the Peruvian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2019, was accepted after its evaluation by the Cervantes Institute and the Royal Spanish Academy, the organizing entities of the International Congresses of the Spanish Language, together with the Association of Spanish Language Academies (ASALE), and the government of the host country.
However, Arequipa was forced to forgo the congress in favor of Cadiz because of the political instability that erupted in December 2022 in Peru following Pedro Castillo’s self-coup from the country’s presidency.
The agreement to hold the CILE in Arequipa (which received the support of all the participants in the Cadiz congress) has remained in force and has been formally resumed as of this past Monday after the delivery to the Cervantes Institute of a letter signed by the Peruvian Foreign Minister, Javier González-Olaechea, in which the commitments to organize and hold the X CILE “according to the same terms that the governments of Peru and Spain agreed at the time” are recognized.
The event will be held on a date yet to be determined in 2025, to be agreed together with the Royal Spanish Academy and ASALE. It also establishes that the Academic Secretariat of the Congress will be exercised by the Peruvian Academy of Language.
